Tag Archives: st lawrence river

Monday 3rd October 2016 – MY LAST FULL DAY …

…in Godbout, so how am I going to celebrate it?

We can start off by my telling you where I went last night.

I was driving a coach into north London – somewhere around the top end of the Edgeware Road where there was a coach station (which there wasn’t) and after dropping a few people off, I had a panic attack because I needed to go to the south side of the river and for some unaccountable reason I couldn’t remember the way, although it’s a route that I’ve travelled dozens of times. I could only remember bits and pieces of the route.

Strangely enough (or maybe not), now that I’m awake, I’ve gone through the route in my mind. And I find that I can’t now remember it. Furthermore, I can’t remember several routes that I used to use going through London and that’s all rather worrying for me. Not that I’ll ever need them, but it’s certainly a sign of decay.

I say “awake” rather loosely because it was something of a struggle for me to be up and about this morning. But up and about I was, but not for long and I was soon back upstairs.

This was where I had an idea about today’s drive. Remember the other day at Franquelin when I mentioned about the old road and the bridge that I couldn’t reach? I had a look on an internet mapping site and I could see that it might be possible to access the bridge from the other direction.

That sounded like an exciting thing to do, especially as the route would take me past a dam, a waterfall and a hydro-electric installation. That looked like a good plan.

Arriving there, though,wasn’t as straightforward as it might have been. I found the correct dirt track and drove off down it, only to be stopped by another motorist.

Apparently, it’s a private road, owned by a group of people who have a collection of holiday chalets down at the end of the track. I need to present myself to the gate guardian and sign the visitors’ book.

And so I did. It was nominally $7:00 to enter the area but if I was only going to the dam and the hydro-electric installations (and he told me clearly where I had to go) I could go in for nothing. That sounded like a good deal.

The directions that he gave me took me to the barrage where there was a nice little lake and a visitors’ parking area.

This looked as if it would be a good place for me to eat my butty and to read my book for a while in the sunshine. Especially seeing as there’s water here. As you know, I’m Pisces, the fish, and there has to be water wherever I settle down. And with a vehicle, I can pick and choose my lunch stops.

There was some kind of circular tourist walk advertised and while I wasn’t up to spending a couple of hours climbing up and down the kind of route that they were advertising, I thought that nevertheless it would still be a good idea to go for a tramp in the woods.

Unfortunately, the tramp evaded my clutches and so I loitered in the vicinity to admire the vegetation. Mostly all evergreen conifers and not very much in the way of deciduous trees.

And I wasn’t alone here in the forest either.

While I hadn’t seen any livestock of note on my travels, I was continually being overflown by large airliners. It’s that time of day again – early afternoon when all of the flights from Europe come in to Montreal.

Most of them fly along the St Lawrence estuary at round about this time and I must have counted 8 or 9 that went over me while I was walking.

i’d seen on the information panel at the dam that the footpath went past a belvedere – a scenic viewpoint. It was to there that I was heading.

It is indeed a scenic viewpoint and as it overlooks a lake, it has to be quite high in my table of interest. As you know, I’m not a big fan of hydro-electric power – or, at least, those that are powered by lake retention – but I do have to admit that they do make for some quite beautiful scenery in places like this.

I went back to the parking place afterwards and crossed back over the dam.

I was told that this wasn’t actually the original channel of the river but the blocking off of the original course of the river diverted it into a course that was much more amenable to the extraction of the potential power that the river can supply. Power is, of course, the big thing around here for these villages that are isolated from any other source of electricity.

I did mention that round about here were some waterfalls – the Thompson Falls.
I had a good look round and couldn’t see very much but after a while I noticed some water cascading down the rocks over there. I had to look at it for a while before I could make out that it didn’t appear to be actually coming from the dam.

There was nowhere to look at the falls from a better viewpoint and so I couldn’t confirm anything, but this is the best guess that I can make as to the location of the Thompson Falls.

I did mention that I was told that this isn’t the original channel of the rivière Franquelin.

But whatever it was, the hydro work has created this absolutely beautiful river. And you can work out the strength of the river and how deep it floods by looking at the tree line on the shore. Nothing at all is growing within about 20 feet of the level of the river today.I would love to be here in April and see what the river is doing then, when it’s in full spate with the meltwater coming down.

Back in Strider, I retraced my steps for a distance because I’d seen a sign for the snowmobile trail which I knew led to the back of Franquelin and which I’d tried the other day to follow.

It was a pretty rough trail, but then this was the reason that I had bought Strider. He’s a 4×4 pick-up fitted with the off-road kit, larger, heavier wheels and proper off-road tyres, just the thing for roads like this.

And I’m glad that Strider and I took this road because the scenery along here was tremendous. This is the river Franquelin that we had seen from up above at the dam just now.

A short distance further on I came to a grinding halt. The snowmobile trail shot off into the hills and was pretty impassible from this point on. The roadway hadn’t been cleared for years.

But never mind. My attention was diverted by what looked like another small waterfall on the river. This led down to a set of beautiful sandy beaches that you can see over there on the opposite bank. I was eager to investigate.

And so investigate it I did.

It wasn’t all that much of a waterfall as you can see. It wasn’t very high, and there wasn’t very much in the way of the force of water cascading over the falls.

Mind you, it took quite a bit of clambering (and sliding) over a kind of lava bed to arrive at the foot of the falls so I could be proud of that achievement.

And as to why there was so little water cascading over the falls despite the volume of water in the river, that problem quickly resolved itself
from a different viewpoint.

What we have here is yet another hydro-electric generating station. This one dates from 2010 and is actually owned, for the most part, by the municipality of Franquelin who make quite a sum of money from Quebec Hydro for the sale of surplus electricity.

It was a beautiful, warm afternoon and so I went for quite a nice walk along the river to visit the beaches.

the sand, being of ground-down glacial rock, is of a superb quality and was holding its warmth quite well. It was just the kind of place where I could quite happily stretch out for a couple of hours in the summer sun, had it not been for the whining of the hydro-electric generators in the background.

Mind you, I wouldn’t want to stretch out in the sun too close to the sides of the valley, and the reason for that is quite clear when you look at the photograph.

You can see that we’ve had a landslide just here – and it’s a huge one too. I shudder to think how much soil came sliding down the hill when that gave way.

And all of the lumber too. You aren’t going to be too short of winter wood if you were the owner of that piece of land.

By now it was late afternoon and I was feeling the strain. I walked back to Strider along the river and took a photo of the river in the reverse direction,just to show you how nice it was here.

And with that, I was ready to go home – and back to New Brunswick tomorrow too.

And I’d been lucky with the weather. It was absolutely glorious. No complaints from me at all, especially when you consider that we are now into October.

I drove back to Godbout without any incident and that was my day over. I had my tea and went upstairs to pack ready for tomorrow.

I was going back across the river tomorrow and I didn’t really want to leave.

Sunday 2nd October 2016 – NOW, THAT WAS MUCH MORE LIKE IT.

I took the time and the trouble to rearrange the blankets here on the bed before settling down, and once I was back in it, I remember absolutely nothing at all until about 05:30. ‘Stark out” is the phrase.

It was also a struggle to awaken. Despite the alarm going off at 06:00 and agan at 06:15, it was about 07:30 when I could finally say that I was back in the land of the living. And then only just too. But I suppose that it’s no surprise, seeing as how I’d been on my travels again.

I’d started off with e female member of my family (and I can’t remember who now) and we were working on some project which involved an enormous database and spreadsheet. I’d become involved in this project somewhere along the line and ended up doing something magnificent rather like the one that I did for The Conference Board that time, and it really did look impressive.
From there, I went on to a motorbike – a big powerful thing – and I was looking for a … errr … gentleman’s rest room rather urgently. I had turned off the main highway into some kind of village and there was a supermarket of a certain type down the road near a phone box and I knew that there were conveniences there, so that was where I headed. But it was all an illusion and no supermarket was there. There was however a kind of village hall that was open and so the girls who were rehearsing there allowed me to use the facilities, which were outside and which afforded almost no privacy whatever.

Anyway, it’s Sunday – a day of rest. But I have plans for today so I can’t rest all that much. I need to be out and about.

But not straight away though – I can (and do) take it easy in the mornings and this is what the plan is today. So I retire to my room, just in time to see the F A Gauthier come sailing … "dieseling" – ed … into port, sit on the bed and plot my next move. And when I wake up about half an hour later, I have more of an idea of what I’m going to do.

First off though, I have a good chat with a couple of friends. It’s nice to see friends on line and the power of the internet is a wonderful thing. But eventually, I haul myself off downstairs and out to Strider.

If you remember my voyage around the north shore of the St Lawrence in 2012 you’ll recall that we spent a night at a really magnificent lighthouse at the Pointe des Monts.

That’s only just down the road from here (well, 30-odd kms is “just down the road” in the wilderness of the North Shore) and so today, I decided to go back and have another look at it to see what had changed over the last 4 years or so.

So when I arrived, first thing that I did was to stop and make myself some butties. There was a howling wind blowing and so I didn’t walk out to the lighthouse straight away but took shelter between Strider and a hedge where I was protected from the wind. I’ve run out of hummus and forgot to buy any yesterday, but I do have some vegan cheese

At least it meant that I could sit and ready a book quietly without being disturbed too much.

I was interrupted on several occasions, mainly by tourists arriving who were mostly turned away by the sight of the chain across the footbridge announcing that the attraction was closed, but also by a very good candidate for our “ship of the day”.

I rushed off to grab the zoom lens to photograph it and to see if I could identify it, but no such luck. It’s way too far out in the estuary for me to see it properly.

First thing that I noticed this year, as opposed to when I was here in 2012, was that all of the artefacts had grown labels – and not before time. That means that I can tell you more about the exhibits on show here.

The anchor, for example, is that from a Norwegian fishing vessel of 1032 tonnes, called the Cimba. She ran aground a short distance to the west of here and was lost – the anchor being salvaged in September 1983

I didn’t need an identity plaque (good job, as there wasn’t one) to be able to tell you a little about the shorter, stubby cannon in the background of the previous photo.

Its size tells us that it’s quite old, and it’s definitely British, and Government Issue too. You can tell simply by noticing the “broad arrow” that has been cast into the outside of the gun barrel. That was the symbol for the British Office of Ordnance, which was created in 1544.

The figure “8” would indicate that this cannon fired 8-pound solid shot.

As for the second cannon, no doubts at all that this is a British weapon. Not only does it have the royal crown cast on it, it has the letters “GR” indicating that it was fabricated in the reign of King George.

But which King George? We’ve had 6 of those in the UK. I couldn’t make out a number in the casting, so I don’t know which King George it might have been. The absence of a number might indicate that it was cast during the reign of the first King George, who reigned from 1714 to 1727.

This would make the cannon to late to have been lost during Walker’s expedition of 1711, and so I’ve no idea really what it is doing here.

Over there back on the mainland we can see Strider parked where I had lunch earlier and with the offices for the lighthouse.

I think that there have been some changes to this site since I was here in 2012 because I’m certain that I reversed the Dodge into a gap between the rear of that building there and another building that was behind it, in order to protect me from the howling gale that was blowing up that night.

Unless of course I imagined it, which is always possible.

I didn’t imagine this though.

It’s a wigwam, or a teepee, or a tipi, and on further investigation I can tell you that it is actually a tipi. We’ve seen a few of these before, one that I recall vividly when we were at Goose Bay in Labrador last year. This makes me associate it with the Innu people who have a heritage around this area that dates back a considerable amount of time.

Talking of the Innu – who were known by the French as Montagnais – and their habitation of the area, there was originally no church for them and religious services took place on a kind of ad hoc basis.

This all changed when the Chapel of St Augustin was opened in 1898 following a petition to the church from Victor Fafard, the lighthouse keeper at the time.

However, the local Innu dispersed not long afterwards and so the chapel served the fishing families who lived round the area. They too had dispersed by the time that World War I had started, and the chapel fell into decay. It has however been restored a couple of times since then.

There is a restaurant-cum-cafe that I had noticed just across the road from the Chapel and I did have to admit that I could have done some very considerable damage to a large mug of coffee right at that moment.

I wandered over there but, as you are probably expecting, the place was closed up. As I have said before … "and you’ll say again – and again" – ed … this Canadian idea of just a 10-week summer season isn’t half getting on my wick

All along the coast and round about in this area is an old Innu trail that these days is called the Sentier de Charlotte. It runs from the chapel down to where there was a well-known Innu settlement that has been excavated.

Unfortunately we had a little change of plan here, due to the fact that I crashed out in Strider – and crashed out good and proper. “Away with the fairies” had nothing on this.

When I awoke, I clearly wasn’t feeling myself … "disgusting habit anyway" – ed. I’ve had a few crashes like this over the last 10 months and I can now recognise the symptoms. I’m having a bad turn. And so I set of for home and bed.

But I did stop along the lane to take a photograph of the vegetation. Autumn had come at last and the leaves have started to turn. And quite dramatically too.

These are absolutely beautiful and sum up exactly why I like to be in Canada at this time of the year. There can’t be anywhere else in the whole wide world that is as beautiful as this.

Even the mosses are changing colour too.

Back home at my digs I crashed out yet again for a good hour or so, staggered down to make my tea, and then staggered back upstairs again.

Yes -I knew it – I’m having a relapse aren’t I?

Saturday 1st OCTOBER 2016 – I HAD NOTHING …

… like as good a night as I have had on the others that I stayed here. For some reason I couldn’t put the blankets straight on the bed and it was all very uncomfortable. That rather disappointed me. And I was wide-awake by 05:40 too – something that hasn’t happened for a good few days.

But at least I got to see the sunrise for once, and it really was beautiful. Not quite the same as it had been in Greece three years ago, but beautiful nevertheless.That cheered me up for the morning.

I’d been on my travels too. There was some kind of meeting going on – a reward, effectively, for people who had worked for quite a while at a certain company – and this involved staying at a hotel. I’d arrived and been given my key so off I went to find my room – and that took ages to find. Eventually I discovered the room and went in – to find that the bed was all heaped up any old how. And there was a suitcase in there, belonging to someone else. I went back to reception to complain, and it turned out that we were having to share rooms. I wasn’t at all impressed with this and made quite a fuss about it. Eventually the organiser, a young girl, came over to chat with me and I told her precisely what I thought. She added that the place was dirty and totally unfit for what she had planned, and so was intending not to pay them a penny for what we had – or hadn’t – received. Although that didn’t solve my problem.
From here I went as an observer to see something going on in an industrial city. Transport was the big problem here, with a huge Ship Canal that passed by somewhere in the distance and all goods had to be trans-shipped onto railway trains. Some young guy had the idea of building a feeder canal to the city so that barges could sail up the ship canal straight into the city without any unloading at all. So he engaged a firm of contractors who built it, but not how I would have finished it off because he brought it to finish a row or so behind the main street, with buildings in the way. I would have knocked down the buildings and brought the canal basin up to the main street. But then he was given the bill. he was expecting a bill of a couple of million. The bill was in fact 50 million and he started to have a major panic about how was he ever going to pay it off and as yet no freight had actually sailed up his canal.

I was alone again at breakfast but ended up having a really good chat with mine host. But soon enough I was back in my room resting. I’m dismayed at just how easy I’m becoming tired these days, but it can’t be helped, I suppose. At least I’m here.

When lunchtime approached I hit the road, and headed off westwards to Franquelin. That’s a village on the coast halfway towards Baie Comeau. It’s situated at the base of a steep valley and it was where I had my run-in with the farces of law and order the other day.

This isn’t the modern road into the village by the way. The steep drop to the concrete bridge over the river looks fairly modern to me, and the village is canted off to the side alongside the river. This could well therefore be a previous incarnation of Highway 138 from a bygone time.

Looking back in the direction from which the road comes, you can see the road snaking along the side of the river. There is a bridge across the river way in the distance and I was musing to myself that this was the way that the road crossed the river back in the olden days. I was tempted to go for a look but there was a huge hole in the middle of the road where the local council was doing some work.

And another thing that you will notice is that autumn has arrived. The leaves on the trees are turning. It’s the best time of the year to come to Canada, as I have said before.

My landlord and I had discussed old vehicles, and he had told me that here in Franquelin there were a couple of old first-generation snowmobiles. I was half-hoping to see an early Bombarider such as the one that we saw at Goose Bay back in 2010.

I was rather disappointed not to see one of those, but I wasn’t disappointed to see this machine. I’m not sure of the make or model of this machine and it doesn’t appear to be as antique as I was hoping to find, but it’s certainly unusual and quite rare enough these days. I’d have gone over to have a look at it but the gates were all locked up and there were people around.

No such problems with this machine. This was parked up at the side of the town’s workshop in full view.

Anyone of my age will have seen one of these before. In Europe this would be a piste-basher, used on the ski slopes for flattening down the snow and also for transporting goods and supplies about.

It is a Skidozer 302, made apparently by the Bombardier company, and probably dates from the 1970s, not that I would know very much about it, and I would gladly learn more if anyone would care to communicate with me.

Back on the modern main highway and there’s a small pull-in at the side of the road just here, with a couple of tables. This is where I stopped for lunch, with the lovely view along the coast back in the direction that had travelled.

I had company for part of the time – a woman walking her dog came over for a chat, and someone in a nearby house was playing music so loud that it probably vould have been heard in Montreal.

And the bread that I had bought yesterday in Baié-Trinité was totally disgusting.I shan’t be shopping there again.

I drove on towards Baie Comeau and nipped down to Alcoa’s wharf to see if there was anything moored there.

I was in luck, because we did have a ship here. The Federal Nakagawa it is, a bulk carrier of 20,000 tons on her way from Jamaica to Toledo in the USA, on the Great Lakes via half a dozen or so ports along the St Lawrence.

I thought that she might have been the CSL ship that I had encountered on the St Lawrence while I was on the ferry from Matane the other day, but she didn’t arrive here until the 29th, and so she’s ruled out.

usually, in the bay there are half a dozen ships queueing up to unload, but there were none today. But in the main port is the Africaborg, a ship of the Wagenborg Line. She’s not as big as she looks, being of only 12,000 tons and built in 2007. She’s come here from Ulsan in Korea, from where she set sail on 27th August.

Long-term readers of this rubbish will recall that when we were here in 2010 there was also a Wagenborg ship here in the docks but I can’t now remember the name of that ship

Apart from seeing the Africaborg in the docks, I had an interesting walk around the harbour here at Baie Comeau. Winter is approaching and there was something of a rush to remove boats from the water.

I had a very good time watching them try to load up a diesel-powered yacht onto a yacht trailer, and that was very interesting to see. It might be a surprise to you but I’ve never seen this done before so I was quite keen to watch them do it. But while I was watching them, I had an interruption.

My friend Rhys from South Carolina was on the phone. It’s the first time this year that I’ve heard his dulcet tones so I was quite keen to speak to him.

And while Rhys and I were busy chatting about his bus (he’s converting a redundant school bus into a mobile home) and the solar energy system that he’s installing in it, I was busy watching them remove the yacht. It was quite an art to drive (because it was using diesel propulsion) in between the stakes of the trailer and winch itself tightly onto the cradle so that they could pull the boat out of the water with the lorry and park it up for the winter.

And as our conversation rambled on, they pulled the yacht clear of the water and a couple of guys there gave it a thorough inspection.

And then they reversed the trailer back down into the water, slackened off the tethering ropes, re-positioned the yacht so that, presumably, it fitted better on the cradle, re-tightened the tethering ropes and pulled it out of the water again.

This time it passed its inspection and they towed it off around to the hardstanding at the side where, presumably, it will over-winter.

By now, the battery was flat in my telephone and I’d lost contact with Rhys, so I went off on the prowl to the other side of the docks, with a certain aim in my mind.

Baie Comeau is famous for having a small isolated railway network which presumably transports wood and pulp about. It’s not as isolated as people might think though, because there’s a rail ferry over to Matane where it connects with the Canadian National railway network (or such of it that remains after the decimation of the country’s rail network in the 1980s).

There are some railway sidings on the dockside and a couple of old diesel locomotives that move the railway wagons around. This is one of them. It’s SOPOR 4998, a General Motors GP38, one of the very last built and dating from November 1971.

And SOPOR? It’s the Societe Du Port Ferroviaire De Baie-Comeau.

I’ve actually been looking in the past for the dock from where the rail ferries leave, and I managed to track it down today, narrowly avoiding being squidged by a line of cars coming off the car ferry that had arrived a few minutes ago.

I couldn’t go over for a closer inspection because it’s all fenced off. But that’s it just over there, neatly hidden behind the installations for the car ferry. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a ship here, but you can’t have everything

In fact, the port of Baie Comeau is nothing like as busy as it used to be before Highway 138 along the north shore was completed in the 1960s. In those days it was the base for all kinds of goelettes, the boats that used to sail from village to village along the coast transporting supplies, ferrying people about, and returning with the output of the crafts carried on in the various villages.

Nowadays, there’s not even one coastal boat that calls here.

I mentioned wood and pulp just now, didn’t I? Baie Comeau owes its existence, like most of the towns on the North Shore, to forest products and the town was created almost from nothing in the 1930s when they began to exploit the timber in the interior of the region to make newsprint.

It was someone called Colonel Robert McCormick, who was the publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper in the USA who created the Quebec North Shore Paper Company to exploit the timber resources of the area for wood-pulp for his journals, and this is the modern pulp mill.

I went off to the shops, which are situated a couple of miles outside the town for a reason that seems totally bizarre to me. I arrived just in time to be thrown out of Walmart which, for reasons known only to itself, closes early on Saturdays. The other supermarkets have more realistic opening hours so the Maxi at the other end of the mall was where I did my shopping.

And why is shopping in North America so boring?

Well, when you’ve seen one bunch of shops you’ve seen a mall.

I’ll get my coat.

Heading back to town again, I went to play “hunt the railway line”.

I had visions of it disappearing way into the wilderness where trains would come back laden with lumber, but it seems to peter out here in the middle of the big industrial estate and I’ve no idea why. I went off to see if I could see anything else that might be railway-related, but there was nothing at all. I shall have to make certain enquiries at a later date in this respect. it wasn’t ‘arf disappointing.

But anyway, by now it was going dark and it was teatime. Seeing as how Godbout is so isolated and I’m never likely to be able to find my Sunday night pizza anywhere in the vicinity, I decided that I would have a Saturday night pizza from the restaurant at the traffic lights.

I ate it in the darkness on the way out of town. It was totally overpriced and totally disgusting but beggars can’t be choosers at moments like this. It was after all the only place in town.

Once I’d organised that, I headed off back to my little room in Godbout.

And here’s something else over which we can ponder.

These are the roadworks on the bridge over the river at Godbout and I know that I’ve mentioned them before. But on the way back tonight (I was coming in the opposite direction) we had some really weird goings-on. The lights on my side were on red so I waited, and a red pickup came through from the other direction, turned round and went back down again, even though the lights were against him.

And then we had a lorry coming the other way that had clearly burnt the red light because it was touch-and-go as to whether I would block him in as my light changed to green. He made it through with about a foot and half a second to spare otherwise he would have had to reverse all the way back downhill again.

And serve him right too.

Thursday 29th September 2016 – DO YOU KNOW WHAT?

I had the best night’s sleep that I had ever had.

I was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow and I remember absolutely nothing until the alarm went off at 06:00 – with the radio on the laptop still playing. That was a deep sleep.

I came back up here after breakfast (today’s home-made jam was mango, ginger, maple syrup and saffron) just in time to see the F A Gauthier coming into view, with a bulk carrier in the background.

By the time that I had grabbed the telephoto lens she had steamed into a beautiful position and the bulk carrier was continuing her way upstream.

I wonder she is.

I didn’t do too much this morning – it’s not really possible to do too much with the internet connection here but I did what I could. Despite having had a good sleep through the night, I dozed off at some time and so was late going out. I ended up grabbing a bag of crisps instead of my butties.

I went for a walk in the other direction today, towards the west, and I came across the cemetery of the village.

I had a good nosey around at some of the graves, as I always like to do in places like this, and this lady seems to be the oldest inhabitants of the cemetery. She died in 1880, aged 27. There was a gap of a good few years between her and the next-oldest. Maybe there weren’t too many people living around here in those days.

But that wasn’t everything apparently. There was some kind of stele in the cemetery giving a list of names of people who are interred in here and whose last resting places would seem to be lost. It’s a shame that so many names haven’t been remembered too.

But this stele was clearly erected in the olden days when the original inhabitants were still being referred to as “Indians” rather than First-Nation Canadians.

By the way, it’s an error to believe that the word “Indian” when applied to people in Canada refers to the Indian sub-continent and the belief that this might have been the Indies. Jacques Cartier knew full well that it wasn’t.

The word “Indian” when applied here is an English-language corruption of the word “Indigène” which is the French word for “native inhabitant”.

Godbout has a small school here, and also a very impressive church with a presbytery. It dates from about 1908 and much to my surprise, its predecessor of 1840 didn’t actually burn down like everywhere else in Quebec but managed to survive until it was demolished at the end of 1903

I forgot to have a close look at the statue to see who she was. As you know if you have been a regular reader of this rubbish, the different saints are identified by the object with which they are depicted. This might be Saint Mary – but then on the other hand it might not.

There is a park down at the end of the road – the “Parc Intergenerationnelle”. This must be a paradise for young children, with all of the attractions that are available.

I myself would have made a bee-line for the pirate ship. This is an ideal place for the extreme youth of the village to hang out and many British people would find themselves at home here, for having voted for the Brexit they will soon find themselves all at sea.

As for the adults who didn’t vote in favour of the Brexit, there are things to do here too. My friend Liz saw the photo and asked me if this place was a playground or a gymnasium. It can quite easily be both, without any trouble at all.

I was keen to go over and have a look, and maybe a play on the apparatus but I’d wasted so much time already and I had plenty of other things to doso I couldn’t afford to hang around.

At the side of the park is the second of the two rivers here at Godbout. This is the bigger of the two, called (as you might expect) the Riviere Godbout, and nicknamed (as you might equally expect) the “Grande Riviere”. According to mine host, it’s a famous salmon river and some good fish have been taken out of it.

But the climb down the bank to the sandy beach was quite something. The steps down to the water stopped half-way down and it was quite an undignified scramble the rest of the way.

There is a reason for this, as the people whom you can see on the right-hand edge of the photograph explained to me.

Apparently there has been something of a storm that has eroded away a good part of the banks of the river, hence the beach at the bottom of the steps has gone.

However, it’s good news for these people. They are archaeologists and apparently some kind of considerable cache of seashells has been uncovered. There’s a possibility that it might be an old Innu rubbish dump and so they were busy excavating it.

The sediment that comes down the river is caught by the current of the St Lawrence River which is quite slow-moving at this point and so there’s quite a magnificent pair of sandspits.

I’ve told you before where the sand comes from. But in case you have forgotten, it’s the debris from when boulders have rubbed together as they have been transported by glaciers during the various ice ages, and when the glaciers melted, they deposited the sand on the ground.

It’s for this reason that the St Lawrence River up here, and many other rivers in the sub-arctic regions of the world have such magnificent beaches, and those of Godbout are amongst the best that I have ever encountered.

Had the wind dropped, I would have been quite happy to have sat down here with my book to relax for a while by the sea. However I had to knock that idea on the head, for I had already discovered that I had forgotten to pack my booK.

This piece of wood lying here on the beach caught my attention and I went over for a closer look. What had drawn my attention to it was that there was a good deal of what looked like worked joints in it – the kind that a carpenter might make if he had been using the wood as part of a construction.

And not only that. There were huge nails and metal pegs sticking out of where the joints are. I ended up wondering if this had been part of a shipwreck or an abandoned boat.

My guest house is called the Thépi du Bec Sucré and so it comes as no surprise to find that we have a teepee in the back garden. In the summer it’s used as a tearoom for tourists but right now it’s closed until next summer.

It does however remind me of the story of the chief of a Native American tribe who once took part in a tea-drinking competition. He broke the record, as you might expect, but was found next morning, dead in his teepee.

When I returned to my digs, I made myself a coffee and took it up to my room. Glancing out of the window I noticed something big sailing upriver towards Quebec and Montreal.

Grabbing hold of the big zoom lens and with some judicious enlargement, I was able to identify it as some kind of cruise ship.

In case you are wondering, by the way, the river is wider than it looks. So much so that during World War II a couple of U-boats were operating right here between Godbout and Matane, scoring several hits and sinking several ships in the river before making successful escapes.

And so I’ve had my tea – baked potatoes beans and hot-dogs – and now I’m having an early night.

I deserve it.

Wednesday 28th September 2016 – WELL, WHAT CAN I SAY?

Apart from the fact that this is one of the most comfortable beds that I’ve ever slept in. I didn’t take long to drop off and although I was awake again soon after (and for quite a while too) I ended up back in a deep sleep and apart from one visit down the corridor I was well away when the alarm went off.

I’m not sure about all of the layers of blankets though – I can see them giving me problems – and the beaver skin went on the floor (and if I had my way the stuffed otter would be out of the window) and it’s all very twee, with lots of ornaments and everything in just the right place. It must be a nightmare to clean and dust.

But the guy who runs it is super-friendly and I couldn’t ask for anything more than he is prepared to give. It’s a bit overwhelming in fact, because it’s a long time since I’ve been cosseted quite like this. And who knows? It’ll probably do me good.

Breakfast was at 08:00 with my notaire friend and his wife. And I made a mistake yesterday because he isn’t actually the notaire of Pontaumur but the retired notaire of Pontaumur, because he’s sold up and they are now on their travels visiting places that they have always dreamed of visiting in North America. And it’s a 6-month itinerary too, so good luck to them.

Once I’d had breakfast I came back up here for a rest and to do a few things on the laptop. And if I thought that the internet at my house was slow, then it’s like lightning compared to how it works here. And it keeps on dropping the connection too. It’s extremely difficult to work with.

Lunchtime came around and so I went downstairs to Strider to make myself some butties. And it really was windy – very unpleasant. It rather destroyed the effects of it being a beautiful sunny day. But I’m not here to do nothing and so I put on an extra fleece and set out to brave the tempest.

Here’s a nice little pavilion here on the shore, just like a little Chinese pagoda. There are a few of them dotted around here and there. That would seem to be an ideal place to eat my butties, even if the sides are opened and I’m going to be buffeted about by the wind.

I’m not sure about my book though. The pages are being blown about like nobody’s business and so I’m not going to be able to relax here.

Consequently I decide to move on.

Last night I’d seen a white light in the shape of a cross shining from somewhere in the hills. Today I can see a cross over there where the light was. My host told me that there was a path up there, with some stunning views from up on the top, and so I decided that I would go for an exploration.

It’s not quite such a climb as it might appear, because there are steps that lead up there. That should make it somewhat easier to reach the top.

Godbout is situated in a sheltered bay that is flanked by two rivers. This is the river at the eastern edge of the town, the smaller one of the two, and I’ll tell you its name in a minute when I can remember it or whenever I can track it down.

But there’s a footpath that leads over the bridge and along the top of the shore in the general direction of the cross that I saw, and so I headed out along here as a good place to start.

I stumble across a flight of stairs heading up the side of the mountain and so I start to climb up there. This must be the way to the cross.

It was pretty tiring climbing all the way up here because there are quite a few and I lost count long before the top. I had to stop a few times to catch my breath and I do have to say that the view down to the eastern beach at Godbout was stunning from this position. I bet it’s even better from the top.

403 steps in fact, according to the number carved into the top step, brought me up to the very top where I could see the cross. It’s actually an aerial or antenna support which was rather disappointing because I was hoping that it might have been a Cartier cross.

There were crosses erected all over the cost of the Gasoé peninsula and the shore of the St Lawrence at the places where it is believed that Jacques Cartier landed on his voyages of exploration during the 1530s.

But it goes without saying that if he had landed at every place so claimed, he would still be out there now.

And I was right about the view from the top and its a shame that I have the sun shining into the camera lens – the camera can never do justice to the real view.

That’s the view of Godbout down there with the harbour in centre view. You can see how beautiful the area is here and I’m glad that I managed to make it up to the top of the stairs to see it.

And so here I sat for half an hour or so to read my book and to catch my breath.

Back down to the bottom of the steps (with 399 carved at the bottom so something is clearly not correct) I walked on along the road and came to this beautiful belvedere with a view out across the river.

Here I fell in with a very vocal local yokel who spent quite a while chatting to me. he said that he was driving past here in 2002 when his car broke down. While it was being repaired he walked around the village, fell in love with it and once his car had been repaired, he came back later and bought a house here.

While we were busy chatting, the F A Gauthier came steaming … "dieseling" – ed … into port, making quite an impressive photograph.

I told you that she’s the first brand-new ferry on the St Lawrence for a good number of years, but I didn’t tell you that she was built in Italy – which must have been a major blow to Canadian shipbuilders, and also to John Brown’s of Greenock who have built many ships for the St Lawrence in the past.

But anyway, here she is. She’s 133 metres long and 22.4 metres wide, displacing about 16,000 tonnes, although she might not look it.

There’s a carrying capacity of 800 passengers and 180 vehicles, which means that the queue of unreserved vehicles that used to miss the boat on the Camille Marcoux and which we almost joined when we were here in 2014 may well be a thing of the past.

My vocal local yokel told me that there were the remains of the village’s old hydro-electric plant somewhere along the trail. I wanted to have a look at them if I could and so I set out to see if I could find them.

But I was defeated by the steepness of the climb up into the hills and the looseness of the rocks on the trail – by the time that I was halfway up I was going up one pace and sliding down three. However, there was a beautiful view of the docks and the F A Gauthier from where I was standing.

I walked back to my digs via the beach. There weren’t many people about (I counted two) but it was beautiful along here despite the wind that had sprung up once again.

And I did what I had wanted to do by coming here, which was to have a good wash in the water of the St Lawrence. It’s a rather symbolic gesture that I like to perform, and as this might be the last time that I come here, I was keen to do it.

By now I was thoroughly exhausted and so I went back to my room where I crashed out for a good while, aching all over.

And for tea, I was organising my potatoes for baking but my host told me that he had cut far too many chips, so would I like to cook them with my sausages and beans? That was extremely nice of him and it made a nice change from baked potatoes. Only drawback was that I forgot that I had some malt vinegar for them.

And that was that. I came up to my room and I was out like a light – probably gone for good.

Tuesday 6th September 2016 – “WELL ON THE WAY …

… to the Land of Nod” I said, didn’t I? And at 21:45 too.

And there I stayed until almost 04:00 before i had to disappear off down the corridor. Over 6 hours of continuous sleep is a miracle these days and I’m well-pleased with that. It’s been ages since I’ve been like that – it just tells you how tired I really was.

And that’s not all either. I got back into bed and I was gone again for another hour or so too – and quite right too if you ask me.

First downstairs for breakfast again, and then back up here to do some work, as well as a long chat with a friend on the laptop. The internet is a marvellous tool for this kind of thing and I wonder however we managed without it.

All of this took me until about 10:40 and I had to finish then because there was a shuttle that someone had ordered to take them back to the airport and I had hitched a ride on it. It wasn’t as if I was working to a timetable and so it wasn’t worth ordering one just for myself, even if it is a free service. And so off we set and it doesn’t take long to reach there from here.

And it looks as if the Societe de Transports de Montreal has been spending its money too. In the past, the 747 – the bus that connects the airport to the city centre – was just an ordinary service bus. But now, we have some big six-wheeled Prevost tour buses doing the runs and that’s certainly progress.

Of a sort anyway, because the legendary 25-minute white knuckle ride into the city is over.

In the 60s, 70s and 80s there was a massive investment in the infrastructure of Montreal. But the work was blighted by problems of overspending, over-time and, shame as it is to say it, all kinds of corruption. All of the concrete work that was done in those days is falling apart as you can see in this photo and this is by no means the worst example – just one that was clearly visible right by where the bus happened to stop.

As a result, huge sections of the overhead motorway network have been taken out of service to be repaired and in some cases it looks as if some sections have been demolished. And that means that our journey took about three times as long as it would otherwise have done.

I’m glad now that I didn’t rely on public transport to bring me into the city early tomorrow morning. As a long-distance traveller I’ve always believed in being as close to my destination as possible as early as possible, and you can understand why.

So here I am at the bus station, and there’s a left-luggage place here. It’s $10 to leave an item here for 24 hours but I’m not going all around the city lugging the giant suitcase around with me and I certainly don’t want to be staggering around with it at 05:00 tomorrow morning. Here it stays.

I didn’t stay though. I headed off to the Galeries Desjardins in the rue Sainte Catherine – and for several reasons too.

there’s a Subway in the basement and I’m hungry. What with the delay on the bus it’s lunchtime already and my stomach feels as if my throat has been cut. I managed to eat this one too without dropping it on the floor.
it’s steaming hot again and there’s a sorbet store just across the road. The coconut milk sorbet was beautiful although they were a bit stingy with it, but the chocloate sorbet was disgusting and it was all that I could do to finish it. I won’t be having that again.
there’s a metro station down in the bowels of the place and this is where I want. I’m on the move again.

The metro takes me to the terminus right out at Honore-Beaugrand and there I leap aboard a 28 bus that pulls up right on cue. This is going to take me out to the rue Jarry Est and my storage locker. My credit card expired a few weeks ago and a payment has been missed and I don’t want them to foreclose on contents of it.

It’s a nice drive out through the outer suburbs of the city and then round across the motorway to the industrial section of the east end. The friendly driver shows me where my stop is but I recognised it anyway.

And now we have another problem – and that is that my UK credit card – which is in credit as always when I go off on a wander – has been blocked. "Unusual spending patterns" probably, which is just an excuse for saying that they don’t want me to spend any money so that the bank can keep it. I mean – it’s not an unusual spending pattern at all, is it? Every year at this time of the year I come here.

Still, I’ve been expecting this ever since I was stranded in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 2002. I make sure that I have other cards with me and I’ve even opened an account in a Canadian bank. We can soon resolve this issue – but it’s darned annoying all the same.

Back outside to the bus stop on the other side of the road and it’s the same driver on the return run. We both recognised each other and we had a little chat. That passes the time of day and we’re soon back at Honore-Beaugrand, just in time to be swamped by schoolchildren. It must be chucking-out time already. But then again, we did go a long way out of the city.

I alight at Berri-UQAM and head round to the rue Saint Hubert and the Hotel Bon Accueil.

It’s quite a modern building – dating from the 80s I reckon – but I bet that the rooms haven’t seen a lick of paint since then – it’s quite down-at-heel. But the place is spotlessly clean, there’s air-conditioning, a fridge and the bed feels oh! So comfortable! So much so in fact that I’m well-away with the fairies for an hour or so. And quite right too.

But I can’t stay here for ever no matter how nice it feels. I need to be on my way.

Another advantage of the hotel is that right at the end of the street is the Place Emilie Gamelin.

She was a nun who had a convent here but that was demolished to become the site of the Berri-UQAM metro station and underneath all of the grass and greenery is a concrete pad which is actually the roof of the station.

If I do decide to come back to the hotel here, this place would be nice to come to sit to with a book and a cold drink if I don’t feel up to going for a wander around the city. It’s nice to have a garden close by

But I don’t have time to stop here and enjoy the sun this afternoon. We have things to do.

Our next stop is what is for me the most beautiful building in Montreal – the Gare Viger, which was formerly the old Canadian Pacific Railway terminus.

Canadian Pacific abandoned all of its operations east of Montreal back in the 1980s (hence the reason that I’m obliged to leave the city on the coach) and this majestic building was left to decay. At one time there was even talk at one time of demolishing it, but it seems that good aesthetic taste has prevailed and they are actually doing something with it. And just as well too because it would be a disaster if this place fell by the wayside.

Down to the river next to see if there’s anything loading or unloading at the grain terminals. Montreal’s fortunes were built on the grain that was brought in from the Prairies by the railway and shipped out to Europe down the Saint Lawrence.

And we’re in luck. Not the best Ship of the Day but the first one so far. It’s so far away that I can’t read its name from here (yes I can if I enlarge the image – she’s the Manitoba, or Personitoba as I suppose we have to say these days).

She’s an old laker, as you can tell from the bridge that is right on the bows of the ship. These ships sail around the Great Lakes and through the canals as far as here, and the reason that the bridge is so far forward is that the captain can have a good view of the entry to the locks into which the ship must sail.

And I do mean "old", by the way. As in 1967 as it happens and that’s an extraordinary age for a cargo ship. She’s a bulk carrier of 10902 tonnes, registered in Hamilton on the shores of Lake Ontario and, for a period up to 2011, was known as the Maritime Trader.

According to her manifests, she seems to spend a great deal of time travelling between Port Colborne on Lake Erie and Port Cartier down the Gulf of St Lawrence which we visited in 2012. It looks as if she’s in the ore business then.

Seeing as how we were talking of bridges just now … "well, one of us was" – ed … how about this for a bridge?

It’s the custom, as we know, for important geographical features to be named after their discoverer, and so I wonder what Jacques Cartier said when he sailed up the St Lawrence to here on 2nd October 1535 and saw this magnificent bridge spanning the river. He must have been so impressed, just as I was the first time that I saw it.

It’s a beautiful evening and not cooling down very much so I go for another stroll along the riverside.

Over there is where I should have been yesterday had that music concert not interrupted my plans. That’s the Ile Sainte Helene and that’s the belvedere where there’s an excellent view of the city at night when everywhere is all lit up. I’ll manage without a photo from there though for this year. You never know – I might be back in Montreal yet again if I can continue to fight off this illness.

But just a few words about the island. During World War II it was the site of a prisoner-of-war camp that earned something of an evil reputation due to the severe fashion that the German soldiers were treated in there. It later it became the site of the 1967 World’s Fair – Expo ’67, which, seeing as this was the the period of a considerable amount of major Quebecois terrorism, was known throughout the world as Explo ’67.

Further around the waterfront in the old docks is another ship.

Actuallly she’s a goelette, the Grosse Ile and she claims to be the last working goelette on the Saint Lawrence. She was bought as something not too far removed from a rotting hulk in 1992 and it took 20 years to restore.

Her work these days seems to be nothing more than taking tourists for a couple of laps around the harbour, and I could have been tempted, but I didn’t have the Crown Jewels with me so I let the opportunity pass me by.

Now I bet that you are all dying to know what a goelette is, aren’t you? And so you need to cast your minds back 50 years and more. In those days, most of the settlements along the banks of the St Lawrence were either fishing villages or lumber camps, and there was no road connection between them. Instead, there were the goelettes that sailed along the river from a railhead and worked a chain of these isolated communities, dropping off supplies and picking up the fish or whatever.

There are still several isolated communities like that these days and you may remember coming with me in May 2012 on an icebreaker, smashing our way through the pack-ice out to an isolated island down in the Gulf of St Lawrence.

From here I trudged wearily, because I’m in wearily trudging mode by now, to the metro. It’s my last night in Montreal so I’m going to have a big blow-out.

Quite literally too, because there’s a superb Indian restaurant right by the Snowdon metro station and that’s where I’m heading. Vegetable samosas followed by a potato, spinach and mint curry with boiled rice and a naam bread and that was me well-and-truly stuffed. As I have said before, it’s the best Indian meal that I have ever had outside Stoke-on-Trent.

Another one of the advantages of being in a hotel in the city centre is that travelling time is so much less. Instead of 20:45 it was more like 20:15 when I was home. This meant that I was all done and dusted, in and out of the shower and all tucked up in a comfortable bed by 20:45.

And if I’m going to have to be up tomorrow at 05:00, then I need to be, too. I’m not looking forward to this one little bit.

Monday 5th September 2016 – THEY SAY THAT A YEAR …

… is a period of 365 disappointments, and I’ve been having my fair share just recently. And another one ha reared its ugly head today. The night bus that I was planning to take tomorrow night – well, I can’t. Apparently there’s no room on it, and that’s that.

There is however another bus, but that leaves at 06:00 on Wednesday morning and so faute de mieux, I’m on that. But 06:00 in the morning – does that exist? We shall have to find out.

It also means that I shall have to stay another night in a hotel here, and for no good purpose too which is unfortunate. And “here”, as in the Comfort Inn on the Cote de Liesse, is clearly impossible as there is no way that I could be in the city centre in time for the bus.

However, wandering around in the vicinity of the coach station, I came across a street full of about 20 disreputable cat-houses, a mere 5 minutes stagger away from where I want to be and so tomorrow night I shall be installing myself in one of those.

God help the bed-bugs with me on the way!

Now I can’t remember how many times I left my bed last night. It might have been one, but on the other hand it might have been none. One thing that I do know was that we had the Sleep of the Dead.

I was in bed, as I said last night, by 21:15 and I remember nothing whatever until about 04:40. Totally painless it was.

And I didn’t feel up to doing much for the first hour and a half. I stretched out here on the sofa and took it easy with a glass of cold spruce beer and a coffee. No point in having a decent, comfy sofa if you don’t make full use of it.

Breakfast was from 06:30 and I was there very shortly afterwards (something like 06:31 actually) and here we had a minor panic. Bagels (and a toaster, coffee and orange juice) there were a-plenty. But where was the maple syrup? You can’t come to Canada and not have toasted bagels and maple syrup for breakfast. Anyway, eventually some was found and that was me all set up for the morning.

I had a companion too – a North African who told me that he was from Belgium. He was here on a tourist visa, so he said, but he was looking for work and asked me if I could help him. i gave him a few pointers, such as I know them, which isn’t very much, and then came back up here to attack some paperwork, of which there was more than enough. It didn’t help with me … err … closing my eyes for a little relaxation at some point during the proceedings.

But I can’t stay here for ever. Despite the fact that it’s Labour Day, there are things to do, places to go, people to see and all of that and so I need to sort myself out for the bus.

And I didn’t have long to wait either which was just as well because even though it was only 10:00 it was stifling hot already. The bus to the metro and the metro to the Berri-UQAM station and the coach station round the back. And this is where I had my disappointment.

But of course you know that we don’t have problems, we have solutions and so we set off to put our principles into practice.

This isn’t a photograph of of my selected cat-house by the way. This is a photo of a very tranquil little alleyway at the back of what used to be a boot and shoe factory, and it’s right in the centre of Montreal. It wasn’t what I was expecting to find in a place like this.

This isn’t a photo of my selected cat-house either.

If you are a regular reader of this rubbish you will recall that I’ve been posting the odd photo every now and again of houses in Montreal and the surroundings because some of the inner-city housing has a very special charm or beauty.

And these here in the rue Timothée just go to show what can be done with a little imagination – something that seems to be sadly lacking in Europe these days.

Having resolved the issues of the next stage of my journey, the next plan was to resolve the issues of my stomach. It was lunchtime.

The rue St Catherine is what is described as the city’s “Latin Quarter” – something that took me by surprise seeing as how all of the signs were written in French.

It was also Gay Pride day or something in the street apparently. There were loads of same-sex couples strolling hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm. I took my time over eating my Subway sandwich (without spilling it all over the floor this year) – I didn’t want to bugger off yet.

Last year, you may remember, they had street pianos dotted around all over the city so that anyone who fancied a quick tinkle on the ivories could go and have a play around.

They are doing the same thing this year too, and here is a pianist having a right old go on the joanna and he’s recruited a couple of vocalists to give him some accompaniment. I suppose that it’s all part of life’s rich pageant

There’s all kinds of stuff going on in the rue St Catherine and at a certain point there are four or five giant chessboards. People give their names to the organisers and they are called up to play when a previous game is finished.

Here in this game we had a dispute over the rules of “castling” and I learned something that I didn’t know before. And that’s always good news.

We had a few moment of excitement in the rue Sainte Catherine too. A woman, coming out of a building, saw another man, went over to him to say ‘Happy Birthday!” and grabbed him in the most enormous bear-hug that went on for hours.

I was so impressed that I went over to her and told her that if that was the reaction, then I would like to say that it was my birthday too. However, I didn’t have the same treatment – not at all!

I told you that it was not my lucky day, didn’t I?

But by mid-afternoon the heat was thoroughly overwhelming and the only protection is flight. I flew to the Metro and took the train out to Verdun and the La Salle metro station.

Just down the road is the Parc Arthur Therrien, whoever he is when he’s at home, if he ever is, and that was my destination. It was great to see the centre of Montreal from this kind of distance rather than being stuck in the middle of it in this heat.

Over there in the distance at the back of Mount Royal is the Oratory of Saint Joseph which is on the Cote-des-Neiges. You may remember that we visited the Oratory in … errr … 2013 wasn’t it?

But not today, I’m going to enjoy the sun and have a good time, watching all of the people enjoying themselves – and I say “all of the people” because there are hordes here and everyone is having fun – even all of the kids who are splashing around in the swimming pool and the ponds.

As for me though, I headed off into the shade and found myself the first real view of the St Lawrence river for this year. The motorway bridge away in the distance (downstream, fortunately) rather detracts from the scenery, but never mind.

And so, having found a nice shady spot out of the 32°C temperature, I closed my eyes for … errr … 45 minutes and it was totally painless, I’ll tell you that! It did me the world of good too!

Having hunted down the gentleman’s rest room (and had I not needed it I would probably still be asleep there now) I went for a walk along the edge of the river, watching the fishermen, the canoeists and the jet-skiers.

And also admiring the properties on the river front and how I would love to live in an apartment in a building like one of those.

And you can tell by the sky ust what kind of weather we are having today. It’s magnificent.

And so I headed back into the city and changed trains for the Jean Drapeau station on the Ile Sainte Helene in the middle of the river at the other end of the city. That ought to be nice and cool with the breeze coming in off the river as the evening draws on.

But that wasn’t to be either. The island was closed off as there was an “event” taking place there – some kind of music concert that was clearly not my type, so I headed back to town. Just round the corner from the Sherbrooke metro station, seeing as I was in that end of the city, is a little Lebanese restaurant that does an assiette falafel at a very democratic price. That was tea organised.

I headed back here afterwards, part of the way in company with a woman from the North East of England who had lived here for 8 years and couldn’t stand the heat.

And forget your white-knuckle rides in amusement parks. Take the 202 bus from DuCollege Metro Station back to here with the lady driver that I had, and you’ll have the time of your life. I ended up back here, shaken but not stirred, at 20:45 and by 21:15 I was showered and in bed, well on my way to the Land of Nod.

Wednesday 16th March 2016 – HOW WE LAUGHED …

… when the nurse said something last night about it going to snow today. And so would you have done, given the glorious day we had yesterday.

But coming back from Montlucon, and passing through Villebret where you start to climb up into the Combrailles, I saw a few suspicious-looking white flakes being blown about in the sky. By the time I climbed up over the Font Nanaud and down the other side towards St Gervais, the sky was clear again but about half an hour after arriving back here, we got the lot. There’s now about 10mm of snow outside and it’s still falling.

Yes, and I have to go back (GRRRRR!) to Montlucon and the hospital tomorrow too. I arrived there nice and early but had to wait for almost three quarters of an hour before I was seen properly by the nurse. She examined where I’d been injected and where I’d been patched, and told me that there is some reaction so I need to return for further tests.

You don’t need me to tell you what I think of that.

But anyway, off up to the day hospital and the blood transfusion. My favourite nurse and my second-favourite student were there and once more there was a decent and convivial crowd in the room. We all had quite a laugh and a good time, which made us all feel better and helped the time pass by.

Lunch was the usual disgusting muck but at least it was something, I suppose. And although I was finished by 14:30 I told them that I wasn’t leaving until I had had my mid-afternoon coffee.

On the way back from Montlucon I got myself lost in the back streets trying to find the short cut to LIDL. I needed some of my vitamin B12 juice and some sparkling water, and I also bought a couple of big packets of crisps and some packets of sweets to nibble on while I’m driving to Leuven. And they sell 1-litre bottles of orange juice in there and they are just the thing to drink in the van while I’m driving but as usual, Bane of Britain forgot to buy any.

I was going to go back home for a couple of hours afterwards too but it was rather cold and that made me think for a moment, and then with the white stuff, I decided that being back in the warmth and off the road was a much better plan.

And here I am and there I’ll be in a moment – in bed. I’m not going for a walk tonight as I’ve walked far enough today (as well as going all around the hospital I had to go off to find the Records Department to pick up a copy of my file to take to Leuven).

And while I’m on the subject of files and records, I did ask the doctor there to prepare his file and records ready for me to pick up. And so I went to see his secretary and it will come as no surprise to you all to learn that he hasn’t done so. I told her “Friday at the latest” (well, actually vendredi au plus tard, but you get the idea).

So I hope that I have a more interesting and exciting sleep than I did last night. I was out like a light in a very deep sleep and the only recollection of what happened was what was on the dictaphone. And we were dealing with football issues yet again.

We were talking about the Controle Technique in football (well, exactly!) and one of the issues in this is that the player concerned has to take a penalty kick. Now it doesn’t matter whether the player scores or misses, or whether it’s saved by the keeper – it’s all down to whether the player is capable of kicking the ball in that situation. One player having his Controle Technique came out onto the field. He was wearing a red football shirt with his name on the back – a really long name that ended with Platini. He was preparing to take the kick but we noticed that underneath his shirt he was wearing a Father Christmas outfit complete with hood trimmed in white and with a white bobble – and his hood is up on his head. He runs in to take the penalty as soon as the whistle is blown, but almost immediately the whistle is blown again to stop the kick being taken, in order to order him to put his hood down so that the controller could see his head and face. And so he does, and then he runs in and takes the kick again. However the keeper is really quick off his line and manages to block the ball with his knees. The ball thus ricochets off his knees up into the air. Now the goal that they are using for this is actually an over-bridge, so it’s clearly the correct dimensions for a goal underneath it. The ball balloons up and over the bridge past the people who are crossing the bridge and then back down the other side and goes quite a way away. The man who has taken the penalty now needs another ball to do something different and so he climbs up the side of the cutting which this bridge crosses, and plucks another ball that was in a bush that was growing on the top of the cutting, so they can continue this Controle Technique.

After all of that, I was down here early yet again, breakfasted and off on the road at 07:30 with the coffee in my Tim Hortons thermal mug. The drive was pretty uneventful with no-one in my way and even though I stopped at the bank to add to the fighting fund, I was at the hospital for 08:20.

I spent most of the day dealing with my Canada 2014 voyage for the month of September. I’ve now arrived back on Nova Scotia (travelling backwards of course) but then I had to start from the other end at Montreal and reach as far as the Sorel – St Ignace ferry across the St Lawrence because there’s a gap in my notes. I know that they are there because I remember transcribing them and I’m sure that I’ve seen them, but they are probably out of order so I’ll need to find them – and the easiest way to find them is to start at the other and and file the stuff from there, and eventually I’ll come across them.

That’s a nice job for me tomorrow then, seeing as how I have to spend all blasted day in that perishing mausoleum.

Thursday 8th October 2015 – THAT WAS ANOTHER …

… sleep of the dead last night. I was watching a film on the laptop but after about 20 minutes I gave it up as a bad job and that was that. I didn’t feel a thing until the morning and I was awake long before the alarm went off.

I’d been on my travels too, and they really were travels. I’d started off back on the buses, doing the regular Friday night run that I used to do for Shearings – up around Central Scotland and that area. Then Cecile and I were living somewhere in Belgium and it was midwinter. We had a day and a half spare and so I suggested that we go off to the Arctic Circle. I had three Cortinas in various conditions (all of them running, after a fashion) and I chose the worst one to do the trip, if I could remember where it was and if the Council hadn’t towed it away. But although it took me about 30 seconds to pack (and I was amazed at how little I needed) it took Cecile almost all of the day and a half to make herself ready.

Finally, I was in Stoke on Trent with someone whom I used to know and we were just stilling around doing very little and talking. And Zero put in an appearance too.

All in all, I’m surprised that my journey through the night hadn’t thoroughly worn me out. And on waking up I noticed that there was no condensation on the roof even though I’d been cooking in here and it had rained during the evening.

There’s no photo of my spec from last night, because while I was putting away everything into Strider I noticed through the trees some movement in the bay away in the distance, so I shot over to see what it was.

I know that there’s a sawdust barge that works the coast around here collecting the waste products from the sawmills to take to Matane and while I wouldn’t recognise a sawdust barge even if I were to trip over one, this one looks as if it could be something to do with that.

I went back on the road, having forgotten about photographing my camp, and instead of going around the coast I ended up in the mountains taking a short cut.

The autumn colours up here really are magnificent. You can understand why it is that I enjoy travelling round the eastern part of Canada at this time of the year. And to live in one of those cabins over there would be superb. If only I could see the sea from there.

I rediscovered the sea at Riviere au Renard and found myself head-on in a howling gale. I parked up and went for a walk around the harbour but the wind blew me back to Strider and so I didn’t get to see too much.

The harbour was however quite full of fishing boats but many of them were up on stocks. The fishing around here these days has been having an enormous struggle since the collapse of the cod industry in 1992

The north coast of the Gaspé Peninsula – the southern shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence – is really beautiful.

The road along here is something comparatively new. It’s all up steep headland and down into deep inlets, and in almost every inlet there’s a small fishing village with a quay and a church, and is usually called St-Something or Anse (Cove) au Something Else.

Every one of them is extremely photogenic but the difficulty that you have is finding a good uninterrupted view of the place.

Prior to the roads being here along the coast, the only access to these small villages was by sea and you’ll remember when we were in Matane the other day we visited the marine museum that was situated in the old quay from where all of the coastal boats used to depart.

And if you know anything about cloud formations (which you will do if you’ve been reading this rubbish for any reasonable length of time) you won’t need me to tell you where the northern shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence might be.

While I was stopped and having my lunch, I noticed this object way out in the gulf. And it was moving too, and so with the telephoto lens I squeezed off a good long-distance shot.

You can’t tell what it is from here, but from the headland at the back it was easy to identify. It’s the superstructure of a large bulk carrier heading down the Gulf of St Lawrence towards the Atlantic. As I said before, it’s hard to understand why so many people were unable to believe that the world was round when you see evidence like this.

Talking of ships, we haven’t had a real ship of the day for a couple of days. And so when I saw this one steaming (or rather dieseling) past the foot of the headland upon which I was standing, I had to take a photo.

She’s too far out for me to be able to identify her name but she’s one of the fleet of Maersk Container Ships and according to the company’s interactive fleet map, 24 hours after I saw this ship, the Maersk Carolina was leaving the Gulf of St Lawrence and the Maersk Palermo was still in the river.

It’s more likely though to be the Maersk Penang that had arrived in Montreal from Antwerp and was now on its way out to Halifax.

From here I went off to find a place to stay. As I said, it’s becoming darker earlier and earlier and I don’t want to be caught out again.

-6

Sunday 4th October 2015 – I DUNNO …

… what I had eaten last night, but I had an appalling night where I didn’t sleep a wink due to the most violent indigestion. I can now tell you all about my digestive tract such as where it is and how long it takes for something to work its way through it, because I could feel it on its travels for every inch of the way.

And so feeling like death warmed up, I eventually hit the road and headed east

After a brief drive I ended up in the town of Matane and went for a good prowl around the harbour.

I was very impressed, and also very lucky to see this ship in the harbour. She’s the Camilla Desgagnés, a heavy-icebreaking cargo ship and she has several claims to fame. Perhaps the most important is that, depending upon which book you read or who you talk to, she was either the first or the second modern commercial ship to navigate the North-West Passage and holds the rather unique honour of being the only “eastern” supply ship to service and provision communities on the “western” side of the Passage.

Secondly, she’s an unlucky ship and has suffered a couple of major incidents. In 1993, she was abandoned in mid-Atlantic after her engines failed, right in the path of an approaching hurricane. Furthermore, a couple of years later, she was abandoned once more after her engines caught fire

Also in the harbour, and I was very tempted to go over and see about negotiating my way on board her, was the CTMA Voyageur.

She’s the ship that provides the supply and provisioning service to the Iles de la Madeleine, off the coast of Prince Edward Island, and there’s room on board for a few motor vehicles. However, she was all loaded up and they were just shunting a couple of trailers on, ready to depart. And not only that, it’s a good way out to the Madeleines and I didn’t know when I would be likely to be able to make my way back.

Also in the harbour moored next to the CTMA Voyageur was the Camille Marcoux. However, we all know about her because we have sailed upon her a couple of times – once in November 2010 and again in September 2014. She’s the ship that runs the ferry route between Matane and Godbout on the northern shore of the St Lawrence.

Our trip in 2010 was quite noteworthy, as I’m sure you remember, because we had tickets for the ferry to Baie Comeau from here but Bane of Britain somehow contrived to park himself in the wrong ferry queue.

I was feeling a little better by now and so I went for a coffee and something to eat at Tim Horton’s and to use the internet there. I managed to pick up my order without throwing it all over the floor this time, and I was there for about three hours because I was really finding it difficult to move.

Matane is effectively the gateway over to the southern shore of the Gaspé Peninsula and there is a pass through the Appalachian Mountains at the headwaters of the Matane and Matapedia Rivers.

Out of Matane, you follow Highway 195 up along the valley of the Matane River and the scenery here is really beautiful even if the light is quite depressing for photography purposes. You could take hundreds of photos of the scenery here and still not do the area any justice.

The higher up into the mountains we go, the more impressive the scenery becomes.

And it’s not just the natural scenery either but the man-made scenery too because we encounter several covered bridges across the river. The longest covered bridge in the world is in Hartland, New Brunswick, but Quebec has very much more than its fair share of them, as far as pure numbers are concerned. And those that are left (because hundreds have disappeared) are very-well maintained.

At the headwaters of the River Matane we start to climb up and over the watershed into the drainage basin of the Matapedia River.

This road is another thoroughly impressive road with some really impressive scenery, and it bounces you up and down everywhere as you climb steeply into the Appalachians. And then, just as steeply, it drops you down into the valley of the Matapedia River, where we rejoin Highway 132 at Amqui.

And it was along here that I decided that I couldn’t go on any more. Around the bend, a motel appeared offering rooms with cuisinettes for just $49:95 plus taxes. Furnished like something out of the 1950s, nevertheless I’ve stayed in far worse places than this for far more money too.

I booked myself in, found my room, went inside and, still feeling like death warmed up and with it only being 16:45, I promptly crashed out and that was that.

-2

Saturday 3rd October 2015 – START AS YOU MEAN TO GO ON.

I decided this morning that I would have a proper breakfast (of sorts) and so I called into the local Tim Hortons for coffee and bagels. And then promptly dropped the whole lot on the floor, followed by the laptop.

Still, at least it amused the patrons of the establishment.

I was up early after my rather late night last night and did a pile of paperwork in something of a vain attempt to catch up and then hit the road for Rimouski and breakfast. At least they gave me some more bagels and coffee. And someone with whom I was chatting confirmed that the serving wench there asked me 7 times if I really didn’t want butter on them.

I’d never had a proper look at Rimouski before and so I had a little drive around. It’s a typical seaside town with beaches, plenty of motels and amusements – just the place to come for a fortnight if only the river were warmer, because the St Lawrence is a really cold river.

But I was here at Rimouski for other reasons. As Austin Powers once famously said to Basil Exposition, “what’s long, hard and full of seamen?”.

There’s a small maritime museum here at Rimouski and the pride of place goes to the old Canadian submarine Onondaga. I’ve always said that you would never ever get me into a submarine, and at the price that they wanted for a visit, nothing was ever likely to change.

There’s quite a little complex of buildings here and the old port facilities when this area was a major port for all of the coast-hopper ferries that started from here.

Much of this traffic has been replaced by road now and what is left departs from the quayside in the town and so this area is redundant. But there are quite a few maritime souvenirs left to visit and it’s a nice place to walk around and to eat your butties

But it was the new pavilion that I had come here to see – or, rather, it was the contents of the new pavilion.

On the evening of 28th May 1914 the Canadian Pacific transatlantic liner Empress of Ireland set out from Quebec on her way to Liverpool. She stopped off at Rimouski to drop off her river pilot and then set off full ahead for Liverpool.

Just a couple of kilometres out of Rimouski she sighted the collier Storstad and then each ship became enveloped in a fog bank.

What happened after that has never been adequately explained, but it’s suspected that some of the portholes were open and the collision rolled the ship so that the water poured in.

The net result was that the liner took the Storstad full-on in the beam and sank within 14 minutes, taking 1012 passengers with her. And they all lie right underneath where that white buoy lies.

It’s the greatest marine tragedy every to hit Canada and one of the largest losses of life of any marine accident in peacetime. Remember that the Titanic lost 1507 passengers, but she was 4 times as big, and this disaster took place right within sight of shore.

Quite a lot of the ship has been salvaged since her wreck was rediscovered in the early 1960s. Some of it is displayed in the museum (and this was what I came to see). Very much more of it is held in private hands, which is a shame.

But what is even more disgraceful in my opinion, even though I know for a fact that many others, including the museum staff, disagree with me, is that much of it, including one of the massive brass propeller screws, has been sold for scrap. $5,300 the salvors were paid for the propeller and that just goes to show that some people have absolutely no sense of history.

In fact the looting of the wreck became so blatant (there was talk that one team was planning to use dynamite on the hull to make an easier entry into the bowels of the ship) that the authorities “nationalised” the wreck and placed it out of bounds to salvors, although private divers can visit it.

And hence the buoy – to moor your ship and to display the “statutory notice” about looting.

The disaster took place just off the headland of St Luce and there’s a modern Celtic cross on the headland there that clearly relates to the disaster.

In the cemetery however is a concrete and stone cross dated 1920 looking out over the headland to the sea. There’s no plaque to say to what it relates but the date and its position would seem to be significant as being an early memorial to the disaster.

It’s hard to understand how it was that the notion of the earth being flat persisted as long as it did amongst the powerful classes.

While I was sweeping the horizon looking to see what I could see, I noticed a few peculiar shapes and so I photographed them with the telephoto lens at its fullest extent and enlarged the image to see what I could see.

It turns out that it’s the superstructure of a ship, way across the other side of the St Lawrence. The ship is at such a long distance away that the hull has been lost due to the curvature of the earth.

As for the town of St Luce, it’s another seaside resort but much smaller than Rimouski. It’s quite a quaint little place, another small town where I would be quite happy to pass a week or two relaxing in the peace and quiet.

But the shore of the St Lawrence is really beautiful around here with all of the beaches. It’s a shame though that it’s on the south shore and so it doesn’t catch the sun as much as the north shore. And the north shore is a good 5° colder so it’s not as pleasant for sunbathing.

I’ve had a couple of really exciting and involved chats with a couple of people today and we’ve really put the world to rights.

However, it’s made the time pass really quickly and as a result the sun is disappearing rapidly. We’re having a glorious sunset but none of this is helping me find a place to stay.

And while I’m dithering, the temperature has dropped rapidly too and it’s freezing. But I’ve found a type of chalet motel place with cooking facilities and while it’s a little more than I would be happy paying, it’s got absolutely everything and I can cook myself a really hot meal. And so I’m saving there too.

And talking to the proprietor’s wife, she’s a vegan too and gives me a huge bowl of home-made vegan vegetable soup. And that’s the most delicious thing that I’ve eaten for ages.

-2

Friday 2nd October 2015 – AT THE FERRY TERMINAL AT LES ESCOUMINS …

Our hero “can I have a ticket for the next crossing to Trois Pistoles?”
Serving Wench “sorry, we don’t do that here any more. You have to contact the terminal at Trois Pistoles”
OH – “how do I do that?”
SW – “you have to ‘phone them with your credit card number” (gives OH the brochure with the phone number°
Ferry Terminal at Trois Pistoles “Our office is open 7 days a week from 09:00 to 16:00 (it’s now 13:40 by the way) but we are not able to take your call. Please contact us by internet”
OH “the phone isn’t working. I have to contact them by internet”
SW “okay”
OH “do you have the internet here?”
SW ‘yes we do”
OH “well, can we do this here by internet”
SW “sorry – we aren’t allowed to do this for customers”
OH “well, can I do it on my behalf then?”
SW “sorry but customers aren’t allowed to use our internet connection”
OH “well is there public internet access then here in the terminal?”
SW “no there isn’t”
And so Our Hero tracks down an internet connection in a local salle de quilles (bowling alley) and makes the reservation himself far, far quicker than it took to enter into discussion with the Serving Wench.

Whatever is the world coming to? As I have said before … "and before and before and before" – ed … the legendary North American customer service is going rapidly down the tubes.

But anyway, last night I did have an excellent night’s sleep. Just what the doctor ordered. Although I did have to heave myself out of my stinking pit on one occasion.

I was also on my travels again too. To Stoke on Trent, in fact, and back to the house of someone whom I used to know up until about 2008. It’s been 7 years or so since we last had any contact and so when we were in his living room waiting for Godot or whoever it was, I asked what new videotapes he had to watch.
“We just watch the same videotapes over and over again” he replied.
There’s quite a probable reason why this person has appeared just now. On my social network account I have noticed quite recently that both his wife and his daughter have been having a look around at my doings, although they weren’t around last night. Not that it bothers me of course – I’m pleased to have the visitors but it has been puzzling me for a couple of days. I didn’t realise that I was that popular

There was not a drop of condensation anywhere at all inside Strider this morning and I didn’t think that it was that cold.

But it was cold enough to freeze the butane can again and I had to roll it around in my hands for five minutes before there was enough pressure to make a good-enough heat to boil the water for my morning coffee. And then I could sit quietly and admire the sunrise – what I could see of it anyway through the rainclouds – with my breakfast.

And I found the old power station at Outardes One too, as you can see. And it wasn’t easy to find either.

I drove around the town for a while but I couldn’t see anything, but in the middle of a housing estate I saw a sign indicating a “Footpath to the Old Quay”. Now I knew that the quay was at the mouth of the river and that the old power station was on the river close to its mouth so that seemed like a good plan.

The path was a very steep drop down about 300 steps and then when we reached the bottom, the path to the old quay went to the right but there was another path that led off to the left and so I tried down there.

A couple of false starts led me up a few garden paths but I eventually arrived at the building. It was all locked up and the doors and window welded closed. But peering through the windows I could see that all of the turbines had been removed.

It’s possible to walk all around the outside of the premises though, and you can see how the water arrived here. It’s not a waterfall or a tunnel bored through the rock, but a couple of conduits on the surface and covered in concrete.

The water goes through the turbines in the building and then out of the building into the river that passes by below.

Going back was much easier than it might have been. Obviously they didn’t bring (or take away) the power station material via the steps and so I had a good nosey around and eventually found an old asphalt path that might have been a roadway. This took me up to the main highway but there was a gate and fence that was all closed up and padlocked.

That’s not inhibited me before as you know, and it was no great inconvenience. And then a nice long walk on a reasonable surface took me back to Strider.

I bought my SatNav in 2010 and every time I’ve come up Highway 138 The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav leads me up the garden path at Portneuf and dumps me at a steel barrier down the end of a dead end.

The town has been by-passed with a modern road and a modern bridge further upstream, but I was curious to see what was at the end of the dead end in Portneuf and so I backtracked on the SatNav route.

This took me through a campsite and up to the river and here I am. The steel barrier is up at the top of the hill over there. presumably there was a ferry and later a bridge across here, I should think.

This was a good place to relax and I had a crash out for half an hour, which was hardly a surprise.

I also took the opportunity to arrange my shopping from yesterday, and I can show you this that I bought.

I’m a vegan, in case you haven’t guessed, and like all vegans, I have issues about Vitamin B12 which is very difficult to find in vegan foods. But this strawberry-flavoured soya drink contains 16 essential nutrients, including a good healthy dose of B12, and so I wish now that I had bought a week’s supply, especially at $2:59.

Then we had all of the nonsense at Les Escoumins but I eventually made it to the quayside, such as it is, for the ferry.

L’Heritage, the ferry that takes us across the St Lawrence, finally pulled in. It was looking very sad in 2011 and it’s looking even worse today. She was built in 1973 and looks every day – in fact every minute – of her age.

But anyway, once Noah and his menagerie and Julius Caesar and his soldiers had disembarked, we could load ourselves up.

The crossing was quite rough – although it wasn’t really. We had plenty of wind to be sure and it was cold, but there was no reason why the ship should have been swaying around as much as she was. Presumably it’s because of her flat-bottomed design but I don’t remember swaying around like this last time.

I had a couple of rounds of toast on board and that took me up to landing time.

It was dark too and I wasn’t going to find a place to doss down in these conditions. I found a cheap motel on the edge of Trois Pistoles and I’ll stay here for tonight.

-2

Thursday 1st October 2010 – I’VE HAD A DAY TODAY …

… where I don’t seem to have accomplished very much at all – at least, as far as distance goes.

But there’s a reason for that – namely that after my week or so out there in the wilderness I’ve had a lot of sorting out to do. And we started off by having yet another red-hot shower. And how much I enjoyed that too!

But working my way through all of the paperwork I was disturbed at 09:40 and again at 09:50 by the cleaners who wanted to attend to the room, even though check-out time was 10:30.

After the second time I gave up and decamped to Tim Horton’s, stopping along the way for a very lengthy chat with a young guy in charge of sales in a caravan place. They are agents for Palomino slide-in truck campers (called caravan autoporté in French) and as that company makes exactly the camper that I want (the collapsible 600 model) it’s always useful to chat to the agents. Who knows what second-hand model might come their way.

Working at Tim Horton’s seemed to take ages and it was, would you believe, 14:00 when I hit the road again. First stop was to the supermarket to stock up on food seeing that I have none left – at least, of bread and salad stuff. Fuel was next and I had a long chat with the woman whom I know who runs the little Ultramar service station opposite the supermarket. I’ve called there every time that I’ve gone past there because I’m sure that she remembers me and we have had some interesting chats.

Third port of call was at Pointe Lebel where I stopped to eat my butty. I’m not buying hummus now, no matter how much I like it. I have a load of vegan cheese that needs to be eaten as it’s been hanging around since last year and it won’t last another year.

From there I went off to look for Outardes One.

There are several big rivers that run down to the St Lawrence, and they are all dammed for the generation of hydro-electric power. We’ve done the Manicouagan and seen some of the dams there, and we’ve seen some on the Outardes too, but Outardes One, the very first one that is close to the shore of the St Lawrence has long been abandoned and is very difficult to find. I’m determined that this year I’ll track it down.

I passed by quite a few places that I’d seen before and before long I ended up at the Pointe aux Outardes.

There are a few houses down here today but formerly this was the site of a reasonably important settlement. The church has long gone but there’s still the old cemetery here and a parking place for the little country park down at the end where there’s an incredible view across the St Lawrence to the town of Matane

the river isn’t particularly wide here, it’s not very deep and it’s a long way down from its mouth. And so it’s very hard to imagine that during World War II two German submarines, believed to be-69 and U-132 – were operating in the river around here and not only sank a couple of ships, made a successful getaway too.

There’s a couple of ferries across to Matane too. One, from Godbout, we’ve sailed on a couple of times but the other, from Baie Comeau itself, i’ve not yet taken but I’m saving that delight for another time. I’m planning to head west upriver.

But it’s a beautiful evening and as the sun sets down in the west, I’ve decided that I’m going to stay here the night. There’s just the odd car pulling in to turn round and I don’t think that that will disturb me too much, and with the little breeze that is rocking Strider I should be quite comfortable tonight.

And it ends up being a late night too. Well after 23:00 in fact. I seem to have been carried away with one or two things that I was doing on the laptop and I didn’t intend to end up this late before retiring. I hope that I have a good night’s sleep to make up for it. And then tomorrow I’ll be ready to continue the hunt for Outardes One.

-2

Sunday 13 September 2015 – SO THAT WAS MY NIGHT …

… in my rather overpriced motel.

It trades heavily on its superb view of Mount Jefferson just across the road, but today I couldn’t even have my money’s worth of that, because of the hanging clouds that we were having (it IS just like home, isn’t it?).

We’d had rain during the night – not much of it but enough to generate this weather phenomenon, and so there I was. But at least there was a coffee machine in my room and I could have a good shower and change my clothes. And I had had a good night’s sleep too. So much so that I’d been on my travels again.

I’d been doing something in some kind of home. Firstly we’d been off somewhere to check on an abandoned house and in there we ound amongst other things a lively ginger kitten. It took straight to me and so I brought it back with me to thins home place.
Back here I had to prepare a bath for some residents but was interrupted as my father (whatever was he doing there) needed to use the bathroom. And then he couldn’t find any toilet paper so I had to hunt around for that.
Another one of my jobs was to water the motorcycles that were growing in pots. You had to start off by using heated water and then continue using tap water when the heated water ran out.
Meantime, this ginger kitten had gone missing in the house and no-one knew where it was.

But talking of being on my travels again, I didn’t go very far before I was sidetracked.

You all know what this is because you’ve seen one of these before. It’s a Nash Metropolitan, made by Austin (and called the Austin Metropolitan in the UK) and was the first car sold by an American manufacturer to be made 100% outside the USA.

It’s either e series 3 or a 4 (you can tell by the chrome stripe) and it’s fitted with the BMC Series B engine. 20,000 genuine miles from new on the original engine, this baby.

And as I said a few days ago, what went wrong with the British motor industry with in the 1950s and 1960s they were selling cars to half the world, and 20 years later, they couldn’t even sell cars in their own country?

And that’s not all either. How about taking this home in the hand luggage?

It’s a Ford Fairlane Crown Victoria sedan, fitted with a Fordamatic gearbox and it has the most magnificent interior that I have ever seen on a car.

This has to be one of the most beautiful vehicles that I have ever seen, and I’m in love with it. It sums up the 1960s USA completely for me. I didn’t enquire as to whether it was for sale, or ask the price because it would certainly be far, far outside my pocket.

I didn’t move on far – just to the town of Gorham.

There’s a mainline railway here, which might be the famous Montreal – Portland line, built before icebreakers could keep Montreal’s harbour free of ice in winter, so that Montreal’s commerce could have a winter outlet.

The passenger service here has long-gone, but the good inhabitants of the city have recruited a collection of locomotives and rolling stock, including this Baldwin 0-6-0 which dates to 1911 and which worked previously in a factory in Massachusetts.

It had a restoration in 1990, so we are proudly told, but this restoration seemed to be the usual North American restoration of slapping everything all over with black bituminous paint to hide the rust and hoping that no-one will notice.

You can see what I mean by looking here at the framework of the tender. The wood has just totally rotted away here to leave absolutely nothing at all and this is just completely dreadful.

On good authority I am told “The steam locomotive was built as New England Gas and Coke n°4, the company later became Eastern Gas and Fuel, and ran in Everett, Mass adjacent to Boston from 1911 to the 40s. It was significantly rebuilt during its life to what you see now and for a while was part of the Steamtown USA collection. Allegedly the tender is from B&M mogul 1435. It was sold off when the collection moved to Scranton and has remained in Gorham ever since. As built, it very closely resembled Baldwin #26 at Steamtown”

And thanks to Alden Burns for the info

And just look at this diesel power car. You can see even from here that several of the metal panels have been replaced with wood and the wood has rotted away just as much as the metal has. There’s notmuch of either left.

Now I have seen some dreadful attempts at preservation here in North America, but I do have to say that here in Gorham is the worst that I have ever encountered. The kind of stuff that is on display here brings shame upon its owners. It really is appalling.

And so from here I set off once more, continuing my route eastwards, missing out on Berlin and Peru but passing by Mexico and into Maine, and occasionally having a few more attacks of the Jimmy Ruffins.

At a certain moment I was passing very close to the watershed between the Atlantic and the St Lawrence basins, and there was the most astonishing view from a peak on the ridge.

It’s a shame that the weather wasn’t better to enable all of you to enjoy the view because, like most views from the camera, it was much more magnificent than it looks on the photo. It wascompletely spellbinding.

I wasn’t alone here either. A couple of German tourists were here too and I ended up having quite a chat with them for a while.

It reached 18:00 – time for me to call it a day and so I started to look for a place to park. And at 18:02 I found te perfect place – a little hardstanding behind a hedge right by the river. And had I had my bed in Strider organised, that’s where I would be now. But you can’t stop at spots like this with a tent.

There was a camp site further along the route but he didn’t take tents. However, he did point me in the direction of a free wilderness camp site about half an hour down the road and I eventually found it.

It’s extremely primitive, to say the least, but it’s free, which is what I need after my motel last night. There’s a nice spot in the corner by the stream and that’s where I’ll be staying tonight.

-1

Saturday 15th August 2015 – NIGHTMARE AT DORVAL

We had another “sleep of the dead” last night – this change of air must be doing me good. So after a shower I went off to see if my room rate included breakfast, but of course it didn’t. Whatever was I thinking of? Breakfast is another 11:00CHF. It’s a good job that I picked up those bread rolls last night.

On my way back to my room though, I couldn’t help but admire the view from the window right outside my door. I thought that I could hear aeroplanes close by.

So in a minute, I’m off back to the airport even though there is hours before my flight. I might find a power socket somewhere that I can plug into – there are none here of course.

The tram came pretty quickly (so quickly that I forgot to photograph it) and the journey was quite simple. And while I was travelling to the airport, I came to a conclusion. My really bad experience last night was caused by nothing more than my lack of preparation – and the hotel can take most of the blame for this (just for a change).

Had it been clear in the hotel’s publicity that there was no shuttle to the hotel (but trams 10 and 12, and bus 510 pass in front of the hotel and a 24-hour bus pass can be obtained … etc), that breakfast was 11CHF extra, and that a Swiss adapter was needed for the electricity, then I would have been prepared, and my stay there would have been quite acceptable, instead of the totally chaotic mess.

But to give you one idea of the hotel, the coffee machine in the hotel sold at 3:00CHF. The same machine installed by the same company selling coffee to a captive audience at the airport was selling at 2:50CHF.

Negotiating the maze that is the airport is by no means easy, and we had another pig-ignorant security guard who doesn’t understand the word "please". All these people who were kicked around and bullied at school when they were kids have really been able to wreak their revenge on society with the massive expansion of what is laughingly called "security". The place was totally packed with people too

But on thing will tell you all that you need to know about the mentality of the Swiss – the "security" screening decants you straight into a huge duty-free shop.

And the number of people wandering around the airport carrying "duty-free" carrier bags shows that this shameless selling technique really works. It would probably work even better at the other side of the security check-in too, especially if it were to sell tranquilisers to calm the nerves (and pickaxe handles to deal with the security staff).

I’m here watching them load up my plane. It’s an Airbus A330-300. And what’s more, I’ve even found a plug that will charge up my laptop.

In fact it didn’t take too much finding – rows and rows of empty seats all over the airport but just one row every now and again with hordes of people congregated around it

Boarding the plane was straightforward and, much to my surprise, the plane seemed to be almost new. Luxury wasn’t the word and the flight over to Montreal, although the longest that I’ve been on to date, was very comfortable. My meals were excellent too. The entertainment was not really my choice – I was even offered the chance to see The Great Escape
– however it wasn’t Christmas so I didn’t bother. Instead, I had Shaun the Sheep, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
.

One downside of the flight, nothing to do with the company of course, is that my neighbour’s idea of personal hygene was even less than my own.

With a window seat, the views outside were superb. With the airport being busy, I’ve never seen a queue like this of aeroplanes lined up in the queue waiting to take off. It was like the M25 at rush hour with all of them here.

The plane in front of us was something quite big and we had a wonderful view from right behind of it taking off. It’s probably the most impressive sight that I’ve ever seen, and there wasn’t much room between the tail of the plane and the ground. You can understand why so many tail strikes are recorded.

Having flown over a great big pile of tundra, we hit the St Lawrence River right at Sept Iles, and I recognised it immediately from the air.

The bay itself was easy to identify, with its seven island and a pile of big ships anchored there, but what gave the place away was the huge Alouette aluminium smelting works and the port facilities that I’d seen in 2012 on my trip up the coast.

I’d wanted to see them from inside, but failing that, a view from the air is good enough.

Another thing that I have mentioned in the past are the huge LaFarge quarries on the outskirts of the city. They are not very easy to photograph from outside, as I had discovered once when I had driven past them, due to all kinds of fencing, lack of parking and so on.

However, here we were this afternoon, flying right over the top and here I was, sitting by a window seat. This was far too good an opportunity to miss, wasn’t it?

But don’t get me started on the ariport and Immigration, will you? Every day, during the mid-afternoon, about 20 long-haul jets arrive at Pierre Trudeau Airport, Montreal. If they are all full, that’s about 6,000 passengers (plus however many come in from other destinations).

The Canadian Government’s response is to have just FOUR (and for a short while, just THREE) immigration officers on duty.

My ‘plane was about 8th in, and I had a wait of 2.5 hours. I feel really sorry for the people who came in near the end and who were stacked up on the balcony because the immigration hall was full. Nowhere to sit, no water to drink, not possible to visit the bathroom. I could go on and on … "not with a bayonet through your neck you couldn’t" – ed.

Luckily I had some good music to keep me company, and that always calms me down. But finding, once through Immigration, that all of our suitcases had been taken off the carousels and dumped on the floor (and no-one knew where they were), and discovering that I’d left my cap on the ‘plane too, and I was off again, wasn’t I?.

Luckily the hotel bus was already there so I had to take my leave of my delightful companion with whom I’d been spending a little time just recently since I encountered her in the queue and we drove the half-mile to my hotel down at the end of the runway.

Having checked in, next task was to hit the city, and there’s a bus stop right outside the hotel. The bus 202 took me from here down to the Metro at DuCollege, and the metro took me to Snowdon where I made a stunning discovery – an Indian restaurant. From Calcutta, they are, but it was the nicest Indian meal that I had had outside Stoke on Trent. Beautiful, it was.

Bad news, though, is that my little ice-cream place on the Cote-des Neiges has closed down. A tragedy! So I had to make do with some mandarins from the outdoor office.

Getting back from the town is not quite so easy – I have to go miles to find an overpass across the Cote-de-Liesse, but I came across some nefarious, nocturnal dealings here. There’s a whole pile of school buses, all from Nova Scotia and all on temporary licence plates, parked down the road. The drivers are, apparently, staying in my motel.

It seems that they are all time-expired (you can only use school buses for a limited number of years) and are being traded in for new ones, to be driven back to Halifax.

And back here, 22:00 (04:00 in real time), I just crashed out. And that was that.

PS- my phone number seems to be working, much to my surprise. It’s the same three figures as the last 4 years, but then 740-6186. If you don’t have the first three numbers, send me a message.

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Tag Archives: st lawrence river

Monday 3rd October 2016 – MY LAST FULL DAY …

Sunday 2nd October 2016 – NOW, THAT WAS MUCH MORE LIKE IT.

Saturday 1st OCTOBER 2016 – I HAD NOTHING …

Thursday 29th September 2016 – DO YOU KNOW WHAT?

Wednesday 28th September 2016 – WELL, WHAT CAN I SAY?

Tuesday 6th September 2016 – “WELL ON THE WAY …

Monday 5th September 2016 – THEY SAY THAT A YEAR …

Wednesday 16th March 2016 – HOW WE LAUGHED …

Thursday 8th October 2015 – THAT WAS ANOTHER …

Sunday 4th October 2015 – I DUNNO …

Saturday 3rd October 2015 – START AS YOU MEAN TO GO ON.

Friday 2nd October 2015 – AT THE FERRY TERMINAL AT LES ESCOUMINS …

Thursday 1st October 2010 – I’VE HAD A DAY TODAY …

Sunday 13 September 2015 – SO THAT WAS MY NIGHT …

Saturday 15th August 2015 – NIGHTMARE AT DORVAL

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